Tuesday, 5 March 2013

Still the fact she's looking at you at all from there in that dark roomwhen out the window
the lovers on the bridge have other things to doas though you were notmerely an invisible screen
concealing the futurebut an almost actualelement in its as yetundetermined developmentfor those presentmust mean somethingafter all

9 comments:

I love that, esp, the last line. I do find that drawing or writing --make me both feel as if I have really been here for at least a moment, and the opposite. I have really been so absorbedthat I have not been here.

Days when I don't write or draw or sit in some kind of contemplative way, I feel like life is being sucked away too quickly. I want to slow it down.

But then there's today --when I am preparing to go to AWP tomorrow AM (snow predicted), a conference that I dread and wonder why I sign up for whenever I do, I only wish time would fast-forward. I think this will be my last stint at such an event. I feel nauseous in anticipation.

This has to be one of the more arresting paintings ever made. The gaze of the woman may be seen as -- what? Open, vague, amused... or simply absent, even perhaps deeply "elsewhere"?

The speculation that this is a mirror self-portrait is of course something outside the work itself. The work itself seems to look toward the viewer at least as much as it does invite the viewer to look toward it. This creates an eerie, unsettling sensation.

As you suggest, WB, one has then an experience of doubleness comparable in some ways with the situation in Blight -- where the Mydans images were rejected for circulation because the photographer's shadow in the picture had provoked in someone who saw the negatives that queasy, almost ghostly "double"-like here-but-not-here feeling.

She has the facial expression that I associate with listening more than looking, which lends itself to a hand-wavily poetic description of painting -- but I note her strokes have paused, if they've begun at all. Is she waiting for me, I wonder? Should I stop fidgeting? Is my attempt at levity falling on the deaf ears of one who hears such things better than I?

Oh, this is a lovely painting & poem, Tom. (& yes, Nin, I agree that an undercover mission would be perfect.)